Sure, the very first iPhone released today, but does anyone remember the first Android smartphone?
In October of 1998 HTC’s T-Mobile G1, or HTC Dream as it’s known outside the U.S would launch being the first phone with the Android OS. The G1 was priced at $179 — which was pretty affordable even in those days — and featured top-of-the-line specs including a Qualcomm MSM7201A processor, 192MB of RAM, and 256MB of internal storage (expandable up to 16GB). It also stocked a 3.15MP rear camera, and a 1,150mAh battery.
I think about that! Our mobile technologies have been becoming less and less accessible as they’ve all settled into the same form factor of big screens with few to no buttons
Indeed. I’ve also seen it with my older relatives. They have a lot of trouble with touch screens, the tiny fonts, minimalist icons, etc.
A lot of the things that feel “intuitive” for some designers, are so because of the history associated with it, and not everyone knows that history.
User studies with people not familiar with existing computer metaphors are always so interesting. It always leads to novel computing experiences completely divergent from the classical desktop metaphor. In many ways, we’ve outgrown the desktop metaphor and could start coming up with better and more captivating machine interactions if we just divorced ourselves from the concept. I don’t really have any good suggestions for what to do about it, but I often think about the hamburger menu icon. That shit doesn’t make sense. You see it everywhere because everyone’s settled on it, but if you were told “make a website that people who aren’t familiar with websites can use and enjoy” you would never use that stupid icon
oh my god I was going to mention specifically the hamburger icon but I got distracted! lol
Yeah, I never understood where that came from.
These analogies are so interesting, because they can stick for generations even when they stopped making sense. I had never thought much of it until I read Sapiens and the author points out that we’re still using steam engine analogies in our speech.